Families and familial relationships comprise an important, likely critical, component of humankind. Though reputedly sometimes abused and occasionally harsh or dysfunctional, for the most part family relationships are and remain one of the primary core building blocks of civilized existence. In addition to providing a mechanism to facilitate the safe and proper raising of children, family relationships also serve as a way to pass content from one generation to the next. In this regard, a relatively complex area of law provides for the passing of wealth and physical things to one's heirs. In the absence of a will stating otherwise, for example, typical applicable laws usually provide for distributing the estate of a deceased person amongst their family relations.
Historically, family relationships have also served as a mechanism to pass along the knowledge of a parent to a child or grandchild. Such an approach sometimes led to relatively long-lived family-based businesses in various parts of the world regarding the manufacturing or hand-crafting of certain materials or products.
Existing behaviors in these regards, however, leaves much to be desired. In many cases, a given individual will find that their greatest asset comprises information. Information regarding what to do, and what not to do, in various situations, for example. Information that reflects, in some cases, a lifetime's worth of experience, experiment, and observation. For the most part, estate planning laws and practices are designed to distribute wealth and things. When the “thing” comprises, for example, a notebook containing such information, that notebook can be readily bequeathed to a particular recipient. This approach, however, typically offers only a relatively short-term solution. The fate and use of that notebook many generations removed becomes quite suspect and unreliable given present practices.
Similarly, the personal handing down of wisdom, experience, and advice from one generation to the next is only as reliable as the weakest generational link. A poor or uninspiring deliverer of such information and/or an uncaring, uninterested recipient can contribute to a complete loss or distortion of such information. There are also individuals who harbor a concern that their personal story will be subject to intentional or unintentional revisionist alterations at a time when they will be unable to correct misunderstandings. Again, the accuracy of a given narrative is more likely to change with retellings from one generation to another than not.
By one approach, a given individual can commit such information to a book, an Internet resource, or other public mechanism to ensure that such information is not lost in such ways. This, however, requires releasing such information to a public forum. At worst, persons outside one's family may use such information while those within the family ignore it, all to the possible eventual harm of the family in a competitive world.
A genuine problem exists, therefore, with respect to providing one's wisdom, experience, and advice to future generations in a manner that tends to preserve both the sanctity of that information and its confidentiality or limited dissemination. Present solutions offer a look-and-feel of value in this regard, but are in fact greatly lacking in substantive effect.